Re: Best Laptop?
> > >> I would recommend the Gateway Solo 9300 series myself. The hardware
> > >> is of good quality, with only the soft-modem unsupported.
> > >
> > > I have a 5300. Erm. Softmodem?
> >
> > Software modem. Winmodem. However you prefer to pronounce it.
>From my discussions with technical people who are deluding that these
broken things are somehow good, it seems to go something like this. There
are 3 critical functions that make a modem chipset. Most of the software
driven modems are "controllerless" in other words they lack the host
controller. (e.g. Lucent.) Some of them also lack another part.
The vague notes over at linmodems.org seem to agree with this. Since the
main function of the host controller is to speak the protocols v.NN, 56Kfoo,
etc. it is sadly, the most important part for most of what we'd want to do
with the darn things.
> Yeeew! Right. I made damn sure the sales understood that I wanted
> a real modem. so i got a minipci xircom with thernet and modem
> but...
>
> > As far as I can tell, anyway. It requires specialised drivers under
> > Win32, fails to expose itself as a serial port and has the right sort of
> > PCI specs to be a software modem.
Actually, under Windows there will -always- be a driver ... but with a true
modem, it will be only a couple K, enough to declare the device's name and
link up to the serial port, basically. The others will have a driver that's
quite large, perhaps 47k or worse.
Whether it's missing one or two of the functions, it will fail to appear as
a normal serial port under Linux, as far as I know.
> > Not that I will object if you can point me at how to enable it as a real
> > modem under Linux. :)
>
> I can't get it to go under linux. :/ lspci gives mention of a uart in
> there but setserial don't give me any results. :/
what, exactly, does LSPCI report for it?
* Heather Stern * star@ many places...
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